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Intellectuals

The professional intellectual is the field agent of the army whose
commander-in-chief is the philosopher. The intellectual carries the
application of philosophical principles to every field of human endeavor. He
sets a society’s course by transmitting ideas from the “ivory tower” of the
philosopher to the university professor—to the writer—to the artist—to the
newspaperman—to the politician—to the movie maker—to the night-club
singer—to the man in the street. The intellectual’s specific professions are
in the field of the sciences that study man, the so-called “humanities,” but
for that very reason his influence extends to all other professions. Those who
deal with the sciences studying nature have to rely on the intellectual for
philosophical guidance and information: for moral values, for social theories,
for political premises, for psychological tenets and, above all, for the
principles of epistemology, that crucial branch of philosophy which studies
man’s means of knowledge and makes all other sciences possible. The
intellectual is the eyes, ears and voice of a free society: it is his job to
observe the events of the world, to evaluate their meaning and to inform the
men in all the other fields.

[The intellectuals] are a group that holds a unique prerogative: the potential
of being either the most productive or the most parasitical of all social
groups.

The intellectuals serve as guides, as trend-setters, as the transmission belts
or middlemen between philosophy and the culture. If they adopt a philosophy of
reason—if their goal is the development of man’s rational faculty and the
pursuit of knowledge—they are a society’s most productive and most powerful
group, because their work provides the base and the integration of all other
human activities. If the intellectuals are dominated by a philosophy of
irrationalism, they become a society’s unemployed and unemployable.

From the early nineteenth century on, American intellectuals—with very rare
exceptions—were the humbly obedient followers of European philosophy, which
had entered its age of decadence. Accepting its fundamentals, they were unable
to deal with or even to grasp the nature of this country.

Historically, the professional intellectual is a very recent phenomenon: he
dates only from the industrial revolution. There are no professional
intellectuals in primitive, savage societies, there are only witch doctors.
There were no professional intellectuals in the Middle Ages, there were only
monks in monasteries. In the post-Renaissance era, prior to the birth of
capitalism, the men of the intellect—the philosophers, the teachers, the
writers, the early scientists—were men without a profession, that is: without
a socially recognized position, without a market, without a means of earning a
livelihood. Intellectual pursuits had to depend on the accident of inherited
wealth or on the favor and financial support of some wealthy protector. And
wealth was not earned on an open market, either; wealth was acquired by
conquest, by force, by political power, or by the favor of those who held
political power. Tradesmen were more vulnerably and precariously dependent on
favor than the intellectuals.

The professional businessman and the professional intellectual came into
existence together, as brothers born of the industrial revolution. Both are the
sons of capitalism—and if they perish, they will perish together. The tragic
irony will be that they will have destroyed each other; and the major share of
the guilt will belong to the intellectual.